All the debate over spending is starting to remind me of the movie Jaws. We have some people who believe there is this big threat headed our way, but the authorities all tell us not to panic — but instead of the mayor of Amity Island telling us the beaches are safe, President Obama is telling us we’ll grow our way out of this deficit.

Right now the Republicans and Democrats are hotly debating which of their two wholly inadequate plans we should use to avoid the fiscal cliff, but looking at the size of the deficit, they’re proposing different-sized Band-Aids where a tourniquet is needed. If you point this out, you’re called a Tea Party extremist who wants to throw old people off a cliff and deny underprivileged Ivy League law students free birth control. “You silly person. Budgets don’t have to balance. That’s just a superstition.”

Everyone is so used to politicians treating our tax dollars with less seriousness than the average person treats Monopoly money that they just don’t get why people are suddenly talking about the need for spending cuts. But this isn’t some idea invented by the Tea Party or Paul Ryan or the Koch brothers while sitting in their hollowed-out-volcano Koch Lair. They only mention cuts because they fear the one truly insisting on them: Math.

Politicians have long ignored Math. And it’s no wonder: Math is unelected, unsympathetic, and highly biased toward the rich and keeps demanding cuts to spending and changes to entitlements that are politically infeasible. In a nation filled with obese poor people, we’ve discovered a long list of things everyone should be entitled to besides food, clothing, and shelter — things people need, like subsidized hybrids — but heartless, uncompromising Math keeps looking at our revenue and telling us we can’t have all of that.

Thus Obama wants Math locked completely out of the fiscal cliff talks and instead wants unlimited power to raise the debt ceiling and then tax the rich because of the demands of Fairness — Fairness being the left’s favorite imaginary friend. Math won’t stop laughing at Obama’s plan to pay for everything by taxing the rich, so Obama just won’t work with it at all.

The Republicans at least acknowledge that Math exists but are only trying to compromise with it. We’re broke, and Obama wants to buy a Ferrari we can’t afford, and they’re trying to argue him down to a BMW we can’t afford. I guess they think if they make some changes to entitlements, Math will just relent and allow 2 + 2 to equal 5 so the rest will add up.

But Math can’t be ignored and won’t compromise. We can plead and cry all day about how much spending cuts will hurt those in need, but this will not move Math. It’s a remorseless adding machine, and it will eventually balance its numbers and doesn’t care what it will have to destroy in the process. But the politicians don’t believe this, and while Obama has so little concern about Math that he sometimes even taunts it (“Obamacare will reduce the deficit!”), some of us see what Math did to Greece and wonder when it’s coming for us. Thus we few ask for spending cuts, as they’re all that will save us. I know it’ll be hard to tell a five year old he won’t get the exact same Medicare coverage as his grandma — especially since he won’t understand what you’re talking about — but that’s the only way to turn Math’s wrath.

People don’t want to listen. But Math is coming. It’s $16 trillion in debt and growing, and one day it will rise out of the water, and even those ignoring it will finally be afraid and gasp, “We’re going to need a bigger boat.”

No, you idiots! Haven’t you been listening? We need a smaller boat. One we can actually afford.

Frank J. Fleming is the author of the novel Superego and the humor book Punch Your Inner Hippie, has penned numerous political humor columns, blogs at IMAO.us, and is a writer for the creative agency Emergent Order.

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1.
Anonymous

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” –George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

I am an old retired scientist, not an economist, but as far as I know, there is only one way to eliminate this massive debt.

And that is by not only allowing massive inflation, but actually encouraging it.
Politicians might try to control inflation at first so as not to scare folks, but once it starts it will most likely zoom out of control.

With this much debt, nothing else seems realistic; not reducing spending or increasing taxes, so look for imminent inflation. Massive inflation will also have the effect of helping Obama redistribute wealth, because it will wipe out the fixed savings of anyone foolish enough to have savings accounts. This means middle-income Americans could easily be wiped out, while the ultra rich like the Kennedys and the Kerrys pay their lawyers to figure out ways to safeguard their investments – probably overseas.

Meanwhile those with no savings will feel no pain since they have no investments to be wiped out, and their welfare payments will simply skyrocket to keep up with inflation; as will salaries of government employees and big-union employees. But I rather doubt that pension payments and social security payments will keep adding zeros to stay even. The result will be formation of a new class of workers and peasants that are totally dependent on the government — which was (still is) the ultimate goal of Marxism/Leninism.

Once the debt is eliminated with cheap dollars, the government can just knock off 3 zeros or 6 zeros, or however many is required to make wages and prices “look” reasonable again. Just look at Weimar Germany to see how this will be done.

You’re wrong, Occam, there’s no way for the poor to avoid pain during hyperinflation. Welfare payments can’t be adjusted fast enough, especially since the very cause of hyperinflation is that we couldn’t afford the welfare payments in the first place. Besides which, hyperinflation necessarily distorts the production of goods from non-durable goods to durable goods, so food prices rise faster than anything else.

Your post confirms, that you are not an economist. It also calls into question you scientific logic. The primary cause of the debt is skyrocketing entitlement costs. ” . . . their welfare payments will simply skyrocket to keep up with inflation.” Would skyrocketing welfare payments not cause the debt to skyrocket? I believe Scientists refer to this a positive feed back loop.

You just noticed? The government has been doing this as a strategy since the ’30s, perhaps even the ‘teens. The only reason that noone really notices it is that they are always careful to make sure that the deficit doesn’t get too large. Then they cook the books on the actual inflation rate, and Viola! we get to pay the money back with far cheaper dollars.
The two most massaged and manipulated figures that the government puts out are the unemployment rate and the inflation rate. According to the consumer price index, everything should cost roughly 3.4 times what it did in 1982. So government notes coming due from 1982 are being repaid with money that is worth one third what it was. By some accurate and unobtrusive legerdemain with the inflationary figures, the government can make sure they cover the deficit.
The problem we have now is that our present inflation (and it is far greater than they are letting on. Commodities like steel, cement, wood, etc. are through the roof) isn’t really due to normal pressures. It is due to a drop in the estimated worth of dollars; a loss of faith that the idiots running things don’t have the slightest clue about the game they’re playing.
Few really worry about a few percent deficit, because they don’t see that the government is stealing it, stealthily, from THEM in the form of inflation. But, that’s alright, because they can make inflation simply disappear! Just by saying so, and continue to print money which contains no value, making yours worth less every day.
The price of gas is not high, the dollar is becoming worthless. Bernanke is holding rates low, because he can, and is printing all the bucks he can to make Wall Street look like it’s OK.
It’s an old game, only this time it’s being playe on our behalf by idiots.

Another way for our state governments to eliminate debt is secession (with economic agreements). States can refocus former federal income and so-called payroll taxes to make good on existing entitlement obligations. Let Massachusetts and other blue pilgrim states figure out their own communistic ideas through practical experience separately from those of us who are sane.

The thing to remember in an inflationary world is that debt is your friend. You might think paying off your mortgage is a good thing. But no. Get as big a mortgage as you can at the current low rates (fixed), and use the money on something that will generate some sort of cash stream to cover the mortgage. For example, buy a small “fixer-upper” house in a convenient location, fix it up, and rent it. As inflation rises, you can raise the rent you charge, but your payment on the mortgage will effectively shrink because you are paying it off in dollars that are worth less every year. When you look for your investment property, check the town’s finances. Buy in a town with a decent balance sheet because you don’t want to get stuck paying for ballooning town pensions, etc. (Yes I realize this rules out many large cities and some entire states.)

“The Republicans at least acknowledge that Math exists but are only trying to compromise with it. We’re broke, and Obama wants to buy a Ferrari we can’t afford, and they’re trying to argue him down to a BMW we can’t afford.”

That, in a nutshell, is today’s republican establishment. There is no better description. John Boehner are you paying attention, you pathetic buffoon??

We are within just a few seats in the House of Representatives of being in a spot where Obama and his Communist friends can basically enact their entire agenda and destroy the greatest nation that there has ever been. We are going over the real cliff if the Republicans lose the House of Representatives in 2014. That is why Obama presses for political gain instead of using his victory to solve any of our problems. For his real party, the Communist Party of America, the remaining agenda cannot be advanced without complete political control of the government. They intend to solve nothing and blame all of our problems on the Republicans in hopes of gaining that control in 2014. I can see that the Communists have you exactly where they want you. Forget about John Boehner because only God can help us if they succeed.

That pretty much sums it up. There isn’t much Boehner can do now. Repubs possess only one half of Congrees, while Obama’s Dems (essentially the new Communist Party) possess all the rest, including the media (powerful propaganda machine that it is) and the education system (powerful indoctrination system that it is). Soon Obama will thoroughly own the judiciary as well. Only Conservative states offer any hope. Ultimately, only God can help us now.

No wonder Obama is so smug. He feels invincible. Can you see how much he enjoys flaunting it? What really disgusts me is sharing this once great nation with so many selfish/narcissist fools (many in my own family and neighborhood) who are helping to bring about our demise by voting in and promoting this destruction.

The point behind negotiating for insufficient cuts is twofold. One, it delays the day of reckoning where budgets balance willy-nilly, and secondly if would get people accustomed to cutting spending. For the last 40 years Democrats have been predicting the end of the world whenever someone proposed even so much as a reduction in growth of government. If we can show such apocalyptic claims are as real ad the predictions from the Mayan calendar we will have paved the way for future cuts. That’s part of the reason the Democrats would rather burn it all down than allow any cuts.

Puleeze. They are the teachers of magical deficits that pay for themselves, and other Keynes-like fantasies.

The only people sounding nuts in the present crisis are the ones that labeled fiscal prudence as a “cliff,” the Republicans. The top ones are deathly afraid that reduced deficits will reduce prices thereby debunking Bushonomics’ “tax cuts for the rich” self-image as a benefit to the economy.

Funny thing is, Boehner himself devised this so-called “cliff” to pretend the Republicans are the most fiscally irresponsible organization in the USA.

But there still is time for Obama to prove he is the biggest thief in American history, over the current title holder, George W. Bush and the national Republican Party!

A great big pile of leftist propaganda. You are a complete Bozo. Go back to your Media Matters gang and puff up over that diatribe. I don’t buy any of it and anyone with any damned common sense doesn’t either. Beat it, troll!

Obama has already proven that he is the biggest thief in US history. Although, my guess is that you helped put him in that position. Obama is amazingly good at convincing useful idiots to do what he wants. Congratulations

We are Greece! Most of us Thailand tourists will choose to have another drink before the tidal wave arrives. Big D.C. will not see it coming BECAUSE they will not be affected,the secure have been secured.The voters have decided and are somehow fine with it.At least we are given the powers to see into the future and brace for the car crash by watching europe on TV.

Can someone explain this Romney worship? He is the grandfather of cap and trade and Obamacare. True, he did talk about protecting Medicare from Obama’s corporatist raidings, but then he picked Paul Ryan, tool of the insurance industry’s plan to Obamacare-ize Medicare, and other fake deficit control plans. True, Romney tacitly denounced that plan, but then, why pick Ryan?

Don’t worry, left/liberal Democrats plan to crash the Dollar and replace it with the Amero so we can all have low prices for things again! (Pay no attention to the Road Warrior-style societal chaos and/or Sharia rule than may come out of such disorder.) Those lazy Zimbabweans just never got around to imposing a spiffy new currency, that’s all!

To see what can happen, in modern times, to a country which ignores math, look to Zimbabwe, which printed worthless paper money valued at 25 billion units. Wouldn’t buy a loaf of bread in the market at the time. The West Europeans might want to look at Wiemar Germany in 1922-26 for another example. On the other hand, our politicians look at Japan and see a debt to GDP ratio of +2 and say, “why worry?”

There’s a reason why Japan can sustain its high debts. And the ratio of debt to GDP was actually higher for America by the end of World War II (due to war spending) than it is now, yet we survived that as well.

Because in both cases, you see a manufacturing powerhouse. Japan continues to be a world leader in electronics for both heavy industry (e.g. Mitsubishi) and for consumer electronics (e.g. Panasonic), as well as continuing to make lots of nice cars. That generates wealth, part of which goes to meet Japan’s debt to its elderly.

The U.S. was a manufacturing powerhouse in the 1950s. So we sustained our debt. And our economy grew to the point that we eventually paid off most of the debt.

What we’re not going to be able to do, is grow out of our debts this time as a service economy. When tens of millions of Americans have jobs like being caregivers to toddlers or the elderly, or as financiers manipulating the money being made by others (often by foreigners these days), we’re not creating enough new capital goods to create new wealth.

Manufacturing was deliberately shipped overseas by our politicians and economic “elites” because they believed actually making things was old hat, old economics. Back in the 1960′s and 1970′s a new idea developed. The future was all in R&D and finance. Actually making things was unimportant and besides was messy and mucked up the environment so that could be sent overseas.

Of course this neglected many truths. There is only so much demand for scientists and R&D types, and only so many people are capable of being good at such jobs. As schools were changed from general education to college prep to create even more such specialists, college degrees have been cheapened to near worthlessness and there is a glut of people seeking the limited, and decreasing, number of jobs they spent fortunes training for. At the same time, what manufacturing is left can’t find enough skilled workers to run the machines because shop classes have gone the way of the Do Do bird, especially since standardized tests became the rage.

Finance and entertainment? Well, that also only goes so far. Very few people have the talent to actually become stars, though how most people in the industry got their jobs is a mystery. At the same time, the vaunted financial industry that was supposed to take the US to incredible heights is nothing but a Ponzi scheme that will collapse the nation when it finally crashes as all such schemes go.

Meanwhile, China is getting rich through manufacturing and, increasingly, by R&D as they buy up US companies and take home all the research, copyrights, patents and researchers. This is because R&D works best right next door to the factory floor, not on the other side of the planet.

Add to the facts you’ve mentioned the impacts of decades of OSHA, environmental and other government regulations that made America a difficult and expensive place to manufacture things. We can’t point to any one law or regulation that did the job. It was more like the death of a thousand cuts. The cummulative effect was that American labor and the cost of doing business here became too expensive.

There’s all that, too. However, the various trade treaties and refusal to address other country’s policies designed to help their industry undercut US producers played major roles.

NAFTA, for example, opened the floodgates first to Mexico and then to China and now that China is running out of slave labor to Vietnam and other countries.

That is not what Free Trade was supposed to be. Free Trade as described by Adam Smith and others was supposed to be between roughly economic and cultural equals. Being nearly equal, each could focus on its comparative advantages and trade for other things without going bust via a trade deficit. However, that bit was forgotten by current so-called free traders, such as those who decided because the US was a rich country we could import everything from manufactured goods to food items, even at the expense of domestic producers, because it was our duty to lift up developing countries. Of course it is laughable to think if any of them would or even could help our economy when all this comes home to roost.

All true enough, however, if what I hear is correct we have something as great as industrial might in our energy reserves IF we have the will to go after it and not blow our toes off to preserve specious arguments about environment that no one else in the world even turns its’ head to look at. Want to compare the Asian or African or Russian environment with that of the U.S. ? Not even close. NOTE: granted we will not always have energy reserves, but over the next few decades we should be able to muddle our way into staying at the top of the heap until we figure out our next move. We always seem to find a way, albeit this time the communists are hard on our tail and closing.

There are plenty of resources out there, particularly energy sources. If it weren’t for the obstinate opposition to nuclear power (and safe disposal sites like Yucca Mountain) we could have many modern plants that are safer than the old ones which are wearing out. Can’t have those nor clean coal nor gas, but we can have windmills and expensive solar panels that only sort of work for a few hours per day, clouds permitting.

“Manufacturing was deliberately shipped overseas by our politicians and economic “elites” because they believed actually making things was old hat, old economics.”

This is just not true. Most of this was a consequence of 1) unionization here in the US, 2) rise in our standard of living and wage structure, 3) portability of know-how and automation and 4) globalization of markets.

In the end, however, our standard of living is determined by our collective production of goods and services and our leverage of our own natural resources. Free markets are the only way to optimize this. The NLRB, the EPA, our “Progressive” Energy policies and the rapid growth of government (which costs a lot but produces very little of value) are all in affect tying one arm behind our collective backs as we strive to retain world economic relevance. It just isn’t easy any more and all of the nattering fools in Washington and Sacramento, etc comprise a petulant children’s crusade destined for failure on the world stage.

You list some good points. However, there still was a plan back in the day do “de-industrialize” the West, the US in particular. Obama’s science adviser is one disciple of this, though he publicly mouthed his disavowal of it when he saw what was happening to the economy because of it.

Until we start making things people want, and of good quality, here again, the economy will not recover. It was all those good paying manufacturing jobs that built up the economy. With so many millions fewer of them it is no wonder that the economy is collapsing. You can’t have a first world economy on Walmart greeter salaries.

Common knowledge is anything but. Mike G is correct in calling out the error in the previous commenter’s premises. But he could have gone further: the notion that US manufacturing has declined is simply not true. The exact makeup has certainly changed, but other than recent declines due to economic recessionary effects and over zealous regulatory meddling, US manufacturing is stronger than ever. Populists, unions and leftist media hacks have done an excellent job of highlighting the lost manufacturing jobs that are essentially equivilant to the decline of buggy–whip producers at the dawn of the auto age, whilst wholly ignoring the resurgence of higher value manufacturing that predominates here. Americans, aside from the last 3 or 4 years (see a pattern here?) are more productive at generating wealth than ever. Bemoaning the upsurge in the service economy neglects the true source of America’s new-age source for generating wealth—information (and other higher order goods)! Manufacturing of durable goods has been properly exported to less productive nations while a significant portion of America’s talent is focused on managing, generating and disseminating information, the greatest source of wealth that there is! Fiscal conservatives need to stop lamenting the last century’s sources of wealth generation and embrace the emerging Information Age. As one seminal example, the awful and tedious conveyor belt jobs devoted to assembling iPhones in China contribute $6 of the added value of a $600 iPhone, while American intellectual, marketing and R&D work, contributions add roughly 80 times that amount—and yet all we hear in the media is whining about those (terrible) lost factory–line jobs that Apple ships overseas! Who needs or wants them here anyway? Wise up libertarians and conservatives. Stop contributing to the leftist progressive narrative!

You are correct. The only way we grow ourselves out of this mess is to start making things again.

There are only three ways to create new wealth. Manufacture it, mine it, or grow it. If that sounds simplistic, it is, but it is an immutable law of economics nonetheless.

The older I get the wiser my dad becomes. He told me back in the 1980′s if we didn’t stop exporting heavy industry and labor intensive manufacturing we would one day regret it. Boy, was he ever prescient.

Your assertion is simply wrong although I would agree that the thinking is old school. At one time the only way to grow wealth was to grow or collect (via hunting and/or gathering) more food. Obviously this is now no longer any more true in today’s advanced economies than your false premise that wealth creation depends on manufacturing physical things. As Rothbard illuminated over 50 years ago, manufacturing of all types is dependent on recipes. Better recipes are valuable and increase productivity. Recipes (manufacturing methods, factory line designs, technology breakthroughs, chemical formulas, genetic codes, computer code, organizational insights, etc,) all leverage human labor, and other capital goods to make more and better goods from fewer resources. US industry is focused (as are many other western economies we compete with) on creating new recipes and then recruiting others to execute them at less cost than we can ourselves, all to the benefit of consumers here and everywhere else. The US remains the undisputed leader in this revolutionary change in wealth generation.

Semantics aside, I will give you that providing goods or services that are desirable are they only ways to produce real wealth. His thesis is correct but your thesis is only an aside because you are describing an aspect of the service economy.

Your observations concerning Japan are out of date. Japan is no longer the powerhouse it was. Samsung and LG are aggressively eating away market share from Panasonic, Sony, Sharp, and the rest. While Toyota may be the world’s top selling automobile manufacturer at the moment, many of their autos are now manufactured overseas. Some Toyotas have more American content than some Fords. Meanwhile Hyundai and Volkswagen are threatening Japanese dominance. Taken as a whole, Japan is no longer vacuuming up the the world’s cash like they were in their heady days for the 1980′s-1990′s when many feared the dominance of Japan, Inc. In fact, Japan is currently running a trade deficit with China!
Finally,money isn’t everything. Japan may currently have enough money to cover today’s elderly population, but they are running out of young people to keep the country going.

However, your primary point is correct. Countries need to create wealth, not just consume it.

The community organizer in chief just won an election on the back of the worst presidential performance in history. Based on this gravity defying event why worry about a little math problem? Also your math is short since the real debt when you include “unfunded” liabilities is more like $100 trillion. Hence the wondrous one’s laughable tax hikes cover eight days of spending at a rate of $3.6 trillion spilling out the door every year. Sooner or later having defied the laws of politics and physics he may yet be beaten down by the laws of math.

Correct. Also, our current debt is being funded at historically rock-bottom interest rates. Very possible that we will have to roll it over at much higher rates. Anyone who has ever gotten behind on credit card debt knows what THAT leads to.

Yes Terry, but the public WILL listen eventually as they won’t have a choice when the checks stop coming. That always seems to get people’s attention.

BTW as a side bar. I currently know of five people who recently went on SSD who I had no idea were in pain. They were all middle class last time I knew. I would suspect that if they are on SSD they are also headed for the food stamp trough, medicaide trough, Title *8 housing trough, energy subsidy trough etc. Interesting. These were NOT poor people.

Rather than “listen” the people are more likely to embark on some other fantasy that, at its core, will involve lots of plain old fashion havoc. Only problem is that with the modern distribution of weapons of mass destruction a lot of that havoc will visit us here.

Mitt told them (sort of), but they didn’t want to hear it (see Greece). Part of the problem is that so few people know anything about history. Talk to them about Weimar Germany and they give you blank stares. It’s pretty much the same situation, although in Germany’s case they were printing worthless money to pay war reparations (remember them?), while in our case we seem to be doing the same thing in order to buy our own bonds to fund ridiculous levels of borrowing to fund entitlement programs.

That Math is tough – where do we go as a country to “cash in” those self-generated bonds, and what is used to pay them?

Romney’s supporters – the RINOs – backed Romney because he was the only GOP candidate who wasn’t a principled conservative. Despite what they all said, they KNEW he wasn’t electable. In other words, they would rather have Obama for four more years, than have a conservative GOP president.

You are incorrect, as usual. But your assertion that Romney didn’t really want to be President is not far off. I bet it will be a generation before another good man decides to try to run for President for the good of his country, and you couldn’t even see that in him. At least that is the best reason I voted for Romney, and I will tell you without knowing who you are that I am likely to the right of you when it comes to political philosophy. So don’t call me a Republican In Name Only. I would have supported Ron Paul to win, had he been their choice instead of Romney, against that assinine Communist who now still resides in our White House. So shove the Romney bashing up your backside and learn who your real political enemies are, before it is too late.

It’s not just the Republican establishment though, it’s the base, including most of the people who write or visit here.

We can’t afford to have an army all over the world. There’s no reason for us to be in Japan, S. Korea, and Europe. They can defend themselves. We get no thanks for it, the opposite. We protect them and they laugh and spit on us in return.

Lots of entitlements are bad, but this site rails against basics like food stamps and yes, even health care. If a country like Costa Rica can manage to provide health to its citizens, I think this country can. We need serious medical reform here. Not Obamacare, not single payer, but not the status quo, either. We need to start rolling back laws and regulations, as well as patent reform. There’s no reason the US needs to pay for all the drug research in the world by paying higher pill prices than anyone else.

What really has to happen is that somewhere between 50% and 75% of all non-defense public sector workers need to be let go summarily. Fifty years ago we had 5% of the work force in public employ, it is now 20%’ and unsustainable number especially when you consider that the average public employee’s salary was less than his private sector counterpart in 1960 and is no more. Out of every twenty workers in this country four are public, twelve have to work to support them, leaving only four workers’ taxes to pay for materials, machines, supplies, facilities, etc. this is not sustainable and is the biggest reason we are growing this debt.

If we deport all the illegals, shut down as many alphabet agencies as possible, deeply cut others, and make those former public employees with their cushy jobs and pensions go into the private sector to do the work the illegals were doing, the problem would be solved. They know this, do not want to give up the affluence and lifestyle to which they have become accustomed, and to a person turn out to vote Dem to prevent it. The fix to the problem would devastate most of them financially, so they resist. This explains the last election, where everyone who receives a government check for any reason who could ambulate made it to the polls to vote for Obama out of terror that the magic checks would stop coming into their lives. Not just welfare recipients, but public employees, grant recipients, subsidy recipients, and rent seeking “private” businesses as well.

This saves the basics, reduces the regulatory burden on business, creates real jobs, and benefits the country as a whole. Obama et al cannot grow the economy the way Clinton and others did in the past because there is no “next new thing”. They tried to turn green energy and carbon credits into that, but both failed. Because there is no “next new thing” growing our way out is not an option. Spending cuts are the only way to stop this. In particular public sector salaries.

Sometime in the not-too-distant future, Richard Trumka & his thug lieutenants will muster a million carefully organized Big Government bureaucrats to fill Capitol mall protesting deep paycuts; cuts necessary to keep the FEDGOV bureaucracy afloat. The real power is in the bureaucracy now. The biggest single enterprise in the country today is g-o-v-e-r-n-m-e-n-t: city, county, state, federal–and every bureaucratic bit of it is organized under one or more of Richard Trumka’s AFLCIO-sanctioned unions.

Maybe the Gucci-shod politicians are hoping for national Big Labor riots to distract us from their utter cowardice & incompetence. The tea party movement gave Boehner what he’d dreamed of all his life and Boehner now pretends the tea party doesn’t exist? What a turkey. Boehner had as great an opportunity as Obama and blew it just as bad. Obama and most of the members of Congress (House & Senate) are cruising for a big time bruising.

If we run out of lamp posts we can use the half-mile marker signs they are erecting along every highway in the country. Damn, but I am tired of the government erecting signs everywhere. And if one gets torn down, they always seem to have enough money for a replacement within days.

Actually, if you read the Founders, and re-read The Constitution, a huge standing military, especially w/ bases all over the world, was never a part of the program.

Huge standing militaries being the tool of tyrants and bureaucrats that they are, and have always been, the Founders were against them. Standing army, yes. Huge standing army? No.

That’s one of two reasons why the military was always radically downsized after every war until Korea and VN. By that point, we were playing with the UN, who always had need of our military to do things they didn’t want to do, themselves. Like sending our nation’s people to die in useless and pointless gestures. (Beirut, Balkans, Somalia…and now, all over Africa.)

Then, we have politicians who declare that every issue is a national security issue, which needs, absolutely needs, I tell you, a huge standing military w/ bases all over the world …and men and women dying in parts unknown, for reasons often unclear and even irrational. I’m not even talking about Southwest Asia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan. iow, in today’s conservative and progressive world, we’ve always been at war w/eastasia.

The math doesn’t support a huge standing military, in any case. Not even if you eliminate welfare and social security. It never has.

The reason we were able to get away with demobilizing after each war is because up until WWII there was always time to remobilize. That luxury no longer exists. In the event of war the choice is between a standing army, and no army at all. While I agree that excessive overseas deployment is no longer an effective strategy, we are always going to need a military capable of defeating any other nation or conceivable coalition of nations.

iow, you, and others like you, are a part of the problem. Keep your favorite programs and departments intact, in fact, we need to spend MORE on them! Cut the other guy’s favorite programs and departments! They’re the real problem!

Both sides creatively interpret The Constitution to support their own favorite policies and issues, when they don’t actually toss The Constitution and the Founders out the window…and then both sides wonder why the nation is up to its ass in problems no one can seem to fix. Of course, it’s always the other guy’s fault.

…I’m about ready to join the ‘Let It Burn’ crowd, here. Both sides openly support police state tyranny, while claiming that only they truly support freedom and liberty…while limiting or eliminating every freedom they can think of…

The cost of defense is historically low, both as a percentage of gdp and as a percentage of discretionary spending. I´m afraid what commenter John Stephens said is true: We cannot build up the armed forces when we need them. Those times are gone.

While a lot of defense spending is certainly wasteful, it isn´t what is breaking us. It is not that much money, crazy as it may sound. It is only a matter of time until we spend more on debt service.

Every American has his own pet idea of what needs to be cut, but the only logical answer is: everything, and entitlements most of all. The idea that we could afford the future wave of entitlement spending if we cut a little here or there literally does not add up.

I’m not a military historian, but it seems to me the best investment in our military we could possibly make is to look invincible so the bad guys leave us alone. The best war is the one we never have to fight. Looking feeble invites trouble in most bad neighborhoods. And the world right now is plenty bad.

Plus, this aversion was the primary reason we got the 2nd Amendment. The people wanted to be able to protect themselves, since the government would not be predisposed to do so. This is both the reason for and against the 2nd amendment today. That is why I say that the only way to legally enact gun control would be through the repeal of the 2nd Amendment. We don’t see the gun control people advocating for that, they advocate for the various unconstitutional “infringements” instead. But, I digress.

I agree, but then, where do you put a quarter of a million vets when you cut the defense budget, bring them home, and early release them? Do they go back into an economy where 1 in 6 are on government assistance? Do we just re-position them back here in the USA and continue to pay them? I’m not trying to be snarky, I’m genuinely worried. As someone else pointed out, we have no potential for growth.

My wife bought me a watch for Christmas. I thought it was made in Finland. Wrong. It was designed in Finland, and made in China. I can’t find very many things in my house anymore not made in China. I have to go out of my to buy American. What happens if the Chinese decide they need more room to grow. How can you stop the nation that manufacturers all the rest of the world’s stuff?

I was careful not to include the military in my plan, Rik, for the reasons you named and others. The military is mandated, and those guys and gals deserve the best. I share your worry. Repositioning them here is probably best.

I also get your worries about China but remember much of what they sell us is trinkets we could do without and not have a huge hit to our real lifestyle or safety. We are going through a reset of middle class standard of living back to more historically normal levels after the great historically anomalous increase 1946-1980′s that occurred due to the fact that we had the only intact industrial base and population of trained workers. That time is over and much of the population and none of our politicians have the guts to deal with it or even tell the truth about it.

As has already been stated, the military is Constitutionally mandated. But it goes beyond that.

If you get down to it, the main function of a military is to deter wars. A strong military and a willingness to use it effectively against against threats will lead to peace. That also includes protecting weaker allies such as Japan and South Korea. Folks don’t like that truth, but if we abandon Japan in the face of rising threats from China, don’t think they won’t turn around and make friends with China to our detriment for the sake of preventing a war they know they can’t win. Same goes for our other allies. Indeed more of them will likely bail on us anyway given what we have done to former allies like Mubarak and Assad.

Lastly don’t forget US history. That is: win a war, gut the military, lose the industrial base to maintain it and keep it up to date, lose the leadership and institutional knowledge learned at the cost of much blood, act surprised when the next war comes, scramble to catch up while throwing thousands of soldiers to die in the front lines until the military gets back to where it should have been all along.

Correct. I was in line once at CVS when I heard a German woman complaining about how high drug prices were in the US. Stupid Yanks! If i hadn’t bee sick at the time I would have explained the facts of life to her. Won’t the Europeans be surprised when Obamacare makes drugs unavailable, as is already starting to happen…..

(yes, I know it’s the Guardian, but it’s actually a pretty good article)

People say, why do we need this large military? There haven’t been any real wars in a long time. Yes, some terrorism but not large-scale organized conquest.

Remember the saying “to secure the peace, prepare for war” (Si vis pacem, para bellum). The larger the military the US has, the smaller the chances that anyone will attack us. The more you decrease the size of the military, the more risk you are taking that some hothead in China or Iran will do something.

Not exactly. When a country declares bankruptcy, it can no longer borrow. Then the amount that can be spent is the amount of revenues collected. This does indeed result in austerity. Moreover there is little to no foreign currency available, so Iceland has been living without imports, a different form of austerity.

Ah, yes the law of numbers. Cruel, cold, and calculating; but in the end unrelenting. All the politicans want to play the game of let’s pretend. Let’s pretend that taxing the “rich” will solve the spending problem and Obamacare will solve the “healthcare” problem. Its all an pretend world. We’ll pretend that the math works, but in the meantime the Fed is monetizing the debt, ie. printing money. This makes the money you already have worth less. So the prices rise: food, clothing, gasoline, cars, appliances, gold, sliver, etc. So you “think” you’re getting a free ride, but really a just being taken for a ride.

All the politicans are just playing the “game”. Really, I can’t stand listening to either side. One side wants the “poor” taken care of and the other side pretends its conservative. Neither side has any credibility which may be why the electorate didn’t turn out of vote. And for me, I’ve turned off the talking head shows. What’s the point? Both sides are lying, dissembling, and shucking, and jiving. All they want to do is prolong the fiction so the damn thing doesn’t change on their watch. So you’ll get your welfare, housing, food stamps, social security, medicare, and medicaid, ag subsidies, until one day the whole darn thing collapses.

My sentiments exactly. I, too, have departed TV and the talking heads.Somehow reading about them is more tolerable than watching/listening to them. I almost believe that the two party system is the Rs & Ds vs the American worker.

Similarly, things are so bleak that you’d expect some brave congressmen to ramrod mega-spending cuts through, or be dragged out of the capital by the police while trying. They are a bunch of worthless pussies, unfit for the office and certainly no match for those that preceded them by 200 years.

Who is this president that he’s death grip is so mind-controlling that the republican congress can’t dare push a spending cut w/o negotiating for his favor first?

Math is one of the Gods of the Copybook Headings, as the Blogfather might say.

“As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!”

I haven’t seen Jaws in years but your analogy is a good one. The mayor of Amity and some councilmen tell low-information citizens not to worry while Roy Scheider’s wide eyed warnings are ignored. The interesting thing is that the director of the movie, Steven Spielberg, is a big supporter of our current mayor of Amity, President Obama… Life imitates art.

The Mayor and his cronies were only interested in one thing: money. Tourism was Amity’s Big Business. So the mayor was actually a Typical Capitalist Fat Cat, willing to sacrifice people’s lives in order to make a profit. Other clues that he was NOT a progressive: his tacky, un-stylish clothes and the fact that he was really, really STUPID.

Standing up to the Mayor and his cronies were the Compassionate Working Guy (the sherrif), the Hip Young Science Guy, and the Anti-Establishment Shark Fishing Guy. However, since the Anti-Establishment Shark Fishing Guy made his living killing other living things, he had to get ironically eaten by one. That’s what he got for monkeying around with Mother Earth and ESPECIALLY for ignoring the advice of the Hip Young Science Guy. Because as we all know, where giant sharks are concerned, the science is settled.

I hope you’ve learned your lesson, Jed. Conservatives can NEVER be the ones who warn people about the giant shark. We’re ALWAYS the stupid, greedy mayor in the white shoes and ugly sports jacket. Always.

Not really, see, you can’t unload that much stock onto the market without crashing the market, never mind the panic that would ensue BEFORE they actually passed such a law. Result: very little actually left to be confiscated. If you think the Laffer Curve is unforgiving, consider taxes based on asset prices.

And the new math (which is really same as the old math but it’s new if you ignored it for a few decades) is popping up in state employee pensions. NJ for example. Consecutive administrations (Witman and Christie as it happens, math plays no favorites), with the legislature’s blessings, capped contributions to the teachers pension fund. This saved the state a lot of money to pretend the budget remained balanced. I believe there was some handwaving regarding the rate of return which would keep the funds legally solvent at least as far as the regulators bothered to care.

The wolf is now coming up the front walk, and pension payments are capped until the funds become solvent again (they won’t). This is going to get very interesting real Soon Now for retired teachers as inflation (regardless of what happens with the CPI) affects them, along with near-zero returns on whatever retirement assets they still have. Teachers approaching retirement are going to start feeling like they’re on the Titanic (or maybe the Andrea Doria, possibly the Edmund Fitzgerald, depending if some, all, or none expect to survive). Teachers earlier in their careers are going to just be glad they have a job, and may want to start lining up homeschooling and tutoring gigs for 2nd & post-retirement incomes. Police, fire, EMT, sanitation, and other state & local civil service are going to start experiencing the same pension pinches the privately employed went through in the 80s and 90s as defined pendions vanished and we watched our IRAs and 401k’s (if we had one) ride the investment roller coaster.

Hopefully this crack up (and those in CA, IL, NY, RI, and lots of counties & cities) will wake up the rest of the country before it is too late for all of us. Or maybe it already is too late and all we can do is hang on for the remainder of the ride. Too bad we’re not all welathy & well-connected like the Facebook folks who are busy moving assests off-shore.

But remember that despair is a sin. And Americans can be very resourceful.

And of course there are fewer and fewer schoolchildren so the teaching jobs will continue to decrease (and the percentage of students that are homeschooled doubles every ten years or so-it’s almost up to 4% now). I never did get why, exactly, teacher unions have always been so “pro-choice” since they’re advocating killing future clientele; seems like an own-goal to me.

Yes. I seem to recall from the WSJ article that mentioned this number that it equals something like 150% of the entire GDP of the WORLD. What kind of math allows THAT to be paid off? I agree, Ann, we need to remind people of this number at every possible juncture. Also, it is instructive to ask people how many zeros there are in a trillion. A lot of people have no clue…

math isnt “fair.” math is apolitical. math is consistent.
math cares not about inequality. math does not concern herself with disparate outcomes. math is disciplined. math is unforgiving. math is absolute.
as my math professor once said, “is that not beauty?”

“President Obama is telling us we’ll grow our way out of this deficit.”

He is? I must have missed that message in between the flood of new regulations, Obamacare taxes, and monstrous debt heading our way. For a guy who wants to grow the economy, he sure has done everything possible to kill it.

The fed buying gov bonds is not very different from the treasury printing money. It has the single advantage that a the secretary of the treasury, or the president could discover. much to their shock and horror, that the fed has been PRINTING money without sufficient backing. After a speedy trial the fed governors could all be hung and a new commodity backed US currency introduced. Debts incurred by the treasury prior to the execution of the fed governors would be payable in federal reserve notes not the new US currency. The problem is that when the current dollar (federal reserve note) crashes the government will need to have a sufficient amount of the backing commodity (say silver ) to weather the inevitable testings of a new currency. Currently the US has NO silver reserves. It is also very unlikely that it has anywhere near the amount of gold claimed (unless deep storage gold means un-mined gold reserves)

But you can’t execute someone for doing something that isn’t illegal. If the law, duly enacted by Congress, permits them to do this, then they have committed no crime by doing it, and therefore no criminal sanction can be imposed on them for doing it.

We’ve been living in a fool’s paradise for going on 50 years. Fiat money, Keynesian debt, huge trade deficits – and no calls by our creditors! Real estate bubbles at home to make every speculator rich and every banker richer! And then came Ben Bernanke and his high-speed vibrating printing press.

And THEN came the 2008 collapse, where not just instruments and institutions collapsed, but the market itself failed. This too was foreseeable, but not foreseen – by banksters who profited hugely by their blindness and have not been held to account.

So, who SAYS math is coming? Like Elwood P. Dobbs, we have wrestled with reality, and come out the winner.

Good, but the problem isn’t the 5 yr old, it’s grandma. Math isn’t going to wait till the kid retires to rear it’s ugly head, it’s going to do it while grandma is still alive and it’s going to take away her Social Security and Medicare. But try to make her believe that.

Math also says inflation is comming. That is one thing I think the politicians are hoping for. With a good dose of inflation that can be magically controlled they will be able balance the budget. Of course our food costs will eat most of our income but who cares…

At my store (northeast US, greater NYC area) the price of bread has just gone up sharply. I used to always look for the specials and buy several loaves to freeze for $2.49 each. Although these were “specials” these prices were offered quite frequently; lot of different brands. All of a sudden those specials no longer exist. The same loaves of bread are now selling for $4.99!! No signs on the shelves but if you put on your glasses and peer at the price printed in purple on the bag you will see the price. Shocking. If you watch very carefully, the store occasionally will sell one or two varieties for $2.99. I have chatted to others at the bread section in my store, but no one seems to have noticed this. How can this be? From $2.49 to $2.99 is a 20% increase in price! From $2.49 to $4.99 is a 100% increase. Well, maybe when those $8.00 gallons of milk start appearing people will notice THAT??

One problem with Math: it often gets blown out of the water by Chance. Math is hard and ineluctable IN YOUR MIND. In the real world, at the scale of reality at which we live, it’s subject to sheer randomness.

Why is predicting the stock market so hard? If it were easy, we’d all be billionaires. Disasters we predicted never show up. Disasters we couldn’t predict sneak up and stab us in the kidneys.

Believe the math if you like, but don’t stop looking over your shoulder.

Today, the House passed the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act 2009 (HR 2920) by a vote of 265-166. This bill requires Congress to offset the costs of tax cuts or increases in entitlement spending with savings elsewhere in the budget. If the net effect of all legislation enacted during a session of Congress increased the deficit, there would be an across-the-board reduction in certain mandatory programs. By restoring pay-as-you-go’ budget discipline as the law of the land, we are returning to the basic rule for every family budget: you don’t spend money you don’t have.

All of this debt will be dealt with by our savior inflation. Savers will be wiped out. Owners of businesses, real estate and precious metals will survive the inflation. Retired persons and the dependent classes will get their checks but they will not purchase much. Everyone will watch TV while waiting in public health clinics. Voters will be furious. They will increase tax rates higher and higher. Young talented Americans will leave creating their prosperity in other lands. America will be on sale for others to move to the continent and reshape it.

Mr. Obama has our credit card. It has no credit limit. In November we just told him to go for it. I have three very-expensively-educated children in their 20s. They don’t see the problem with this. Math may turn out to be a better teacher than college.

I’m not at all sure that hard leftists like Obama see math as a problem. After all, when math rears its ugly head what’s the best way to deal with it from the standpoint of a statist? Why the state will simply inflate its debt away. Yes, that will decimate the poor, the middle class, the elderly on fixed incomes. But it will insure the survival of the state. Plus, a higher percentage of the population will be rendered utterly dependent on the state and therefore passive. Win win. If the state is your god.

The inflation rates Americans have experienced of 10-15% do not destroy an economy the way 100%/per month inflation does. And that is the kind of inflation that is coming. There is little point in producing or selling many items when the cost of replacement materials cannot be forecast and often exceeds the previous sale price. Many stores and factories cease operations. Many items become unavailable. No one will trust a fiat currency once it has failed. So the government will need to introduce a commodity backed currency (gold or silver) . It doesn’t have sufficient gold or silver to do this.

Obama is building the new Chicago on the Potomac. He is using Alinsky, Daley Machine mechanics, and Cloward Piven to accomplish it. The Republicans will not be able to stop him unless they strangle him with the purse strings. It may be too late. And, he has the benefit of the Black Shield.

The leopard’s spots haven’t changed and this fraud is all community organizer and agitator with one goal in mind: to put Chicago’s politics in place in Wash. D.C. Cronyism, corruption, nepotism, blackmail, dirty deals, etc. Pay to play will be the ticket from here on out.

The first black President wasn’t elected to preside over anything other than the fundamental transformation of Washington D.C. into a clone of Chicago politics. When was the last time Republicans had any influence there, or Detroit, or any other Democrat stronghold? New York and California are a couple of examples where Gimmedats control all houses and things are going to the dumps. That’s where we are headed over the next four years.

Politicians do know that Math will eventually triumph. They just expect to personally escape the consequences. And why not. What consequences have they faced since WWII? Even if Math manages to scald a few out of office (unlikely, since they are relentless liars), they all expect to be wealthy beyond Math’s ability to burn them.

Personally, I’m hoping that the disaster will be so disastrous that most of them will be surprised to see their lives reaching unexpected terminations, or even better, that the rest of their lives are conducted in cells shared with starving maggots.

This piece is a crock. Math WILL NOT triumph, because there is no need to balance the books.
Investors are buying Treasury bonds at near zero, practically paying the Treasury for a safe place to park their money. That tells a reasonable person that the dollar is very strong, since people and institutions with billions to invest are not fools.
Granted, the notion of a sovereign currency not backed by gold is historically a new concept, but seems to be working out fine since Nixon took us off the gold standard; the US economy has grown exponentially during that time. Understand that the value of the dollar is really based on confiedence in the economic might of the US. Which means we can print more, which means we don’t need to freaking balance the freaking budget to satisfy those who do not understand economics. We are not Greece – because Greece does not have monetary sovereignty; we are not Zimbabwe, because most of us are engaged in producing high-value goods and services.
Full employment is a mirage, because technology always outpaces people’s ability to learn. At the time we went off the gold standard it took a hundred man-hours to build a car; now it takes five. The only way to keep people from starving is to use public resources to employ them in the public sector, subsidize their retraining, or just pay them to stay home.

All things in an economic zone have a certain worth because the vast majority of the parties involved agree that they do.
That goes for gold, silver, oil, dollars, jujubes, whatever. It is true in all cases.
When the govenment prints fiat dollars, and that government is trusted, the fiat dollars work out fine. Indeed, who says gold is worth anything at all? It is merely a historically valued thing. You can’t eat gold. You can’t make a useful weapon from gold. People who rely on the gold standard bringing everything back to happyland are just dolts.
It’s the “trusted government” part which has sruck a reef. The job of that trusted government is to see that the fiat money reflects value created. One wants the economy to have enough cash on hand, but not too much. But the issuance of that capital must reflect actual value being simultaneously created (useful stuff being made) by the workers in that country.
Our government has, over the last 60 years, made it almost illegal to actually produce anything. Cops, firefighters, teachers (especially) do not produce value in relation to their cost…they are a luxury that wealthy nations can afford. They are hardly an “investment”. They are moochers, off the produce of others.
This country now is made up of moochers to an alarming degree. Inspectors, regulators, salesmen, bureacrats of all kinds, unions; they produce nothing.
Meanwhile, farmers, manufacturers, transporters, almost anyone who produces wealth, have become the primary target of all these damn moochers.
This economy is dead, because Liberals killed it. You can waste as much as you want on Iphones. In all but a few cases, they are timewasting amusements. People pay a significant amount to phone companies and Apple so they can find out what they could have found out with a $29 phone and a $30/month plan. In the real world, that’s called wasting money. The vast majority of these devices are not being used by people who need them. They are being used by stupid kids to blather.
Now, I’m fine with that. It’s a free country. But while they urinate away $500 for an Iphone, make damned sure you’re not getting food stamps or discounted college loans, or anything else I pay for. Because then we have a disconnect between value and cost, and somone else must be forced to make up the difference. I believe that’s called, “slavery”.
The problem is that we now have a goverment that uses that idiot kid model to run the country into the ground. We produce nothing besides toys and paperwork, and you can’t eat either. Therefore, we shouldn’t be printing money.

The federal reserve is buying close to 90% of treasury notes, up from 70% last year. Inflation is not an increase in prices. That is one effect of inflation , which can take 2-4 years to manifest itself. I assure you that serious undeniable inflation is coming. Modest inflation, 10% or so, is already here.

That tells a reasonable person that the dollar is very strong, since people and institutions with billions to invest are not fools.

That turns out not to be a reliable rule. First of all, some are fools. Second, even the wisest tend to diversify investments, accepting that some will be lost as sort of an insurance fee, cost of doing business.

We are LUCKY this is true because apparently a LOT of Chinese holding US dollars are willing to accept very low or even negative returns on US assets, because they trust their own currency and government that little! Does this make them wise or fools? A little of both.

Almost the same goes for much of the world, the US has been THE reserve currency for a generation or two, while virtually the rest of the world rots. However, under the Obamanation, it is unlikely that this situation will continue.

Get ready for large disruptions of unforeseeable types.

If you don’t balance the books one way, trust that they WILL be balanced another way.

The problem with you, “Master”, is that your hysteria carries a fecal stink that your words do not hide, but rather transmit.

After the years leading up to the crash in 2008 and the housing bubble and the events of that year can you really still believe that the financial skimming industry that pretends to be about responsible investing is not replete with corrupt irresponsible fools in cahoots with government enablers and ideologues? Reread Josh’s response until you get it.

The “only way to keep people from starving”, according to you, is to continue to bloat government and ruin more human beings by making them dependent on the apparatus of state for their very existence, so that you and your fellow public employees have even more income stream and income stream security? The “only way”? Good God, any grifter on the street can do better than that, boy. You are either blindingly ill informed, ignorant of history, and incapable of imaginative analytical thought, or you are simply terrified of what math will make the rest of us do to your precious magic checks before much longer.

The money is going to those bonds not because they are strong in any historical sense but because they are infinitesimally less rotten than everything else out there. “Safe” relative to what? The economic might of the U.S. has been sapped by a public worker/private worker ratio that is mathematically impossible to sustain – and shows no signs of going back down to levels that actually work – and by Gramscian decay of our institutions, as well as legislative malfeasance and dishonesty by politicians to the voters about the relative strength of the economy and the dollar value of any given unit of work. Sorry, but 1954 was never going to last forever.

“Paying people not to work” so that others might have higher pay and a little security from rioting is a really, really stupid idea, on a par with paying farmers not to grow grain to create stability of grain prices. How has that worked out for us?

As a British MP famously said, the economic problem with the West is that too many people (public and private both) have come to vastly overvalue the expected monetary and lifestyle value of their labor. That is the root of this public debt thing.

In the private sector, math has already proceeded most of the way towards correction. Not so in the public sector, where the concept of shared sacrifice does not exist (even though when the tax revenues go up during economic good times, there is the expectation by public functionaries that the private sector will share with them then).

The country will be saved when you and half of your public sector employee fellow travellers are summarily dismissed from your jobs, subsidies, and grants, your pensions are swept into SS, and you are forced to do the jobs that deported illegals are now doing, or whatever jobs you can find in the private sector, and damn the consequences to your status, lifestyle, and lives. That is why you attempt to distract, why you argue so hard that balancing the budget doesn’t matter and try to convince people NOT to go for the only option that will actually right the ship and save America. You don’t give a damn about saving the country if doing so takes away your magic checks and elite lifestyle. And you have already made the decision that if your “good thing” goes away that you’d be OK with blowing the whole thing up so that nobody else can be happy, either, like the kid taking his ball and going home. No public employee will ever understand the need to trim or eliminate their job, up to the point of destroying the country in order for him to keep it.

John J has the truth of it, Master. Obligation without compensation is servitude. You and all of your statist friends have already made up your mind that the protection racket will work as follows: you and all your thug public sector gang will let me keep my productive private sector business only as long as we fund you to the tune of whichever arbitrary lifestyle you desire, as well as funding able bodied people on welfare, public employees involved in regulatory overreach that actually harm my ability to function, etc. You do not view me as someone who produces the wealth that needs to exist so that you can have a life, and feel gratitude. You look at me in much the same way a tapeworm looks at an intestine.

-where your jobs, subsidies, grants, and pensions are swept into SS”
Ye gods, what a great idea!

What would the results of public sector being ground into the coming ‘guarenteed retir’ement annuity’ scamand folded into SS ‘general revenue’ theft be- after all, that’s what the public sector is planning to do to us and our savings, a la Argentina!

Why won’t you people (and others) stop giving what is coming such cutesy names? We are confronting the OBAMA TAX INCREASES, nothing else! Had we called them what they are six months ago, Romney would have been elected.
The OBAMA TAX INCREASES are coming. We’ll be happy to take some of the weight off The One, but he’s got to negotiate in good faith this time or all the tax increases are on him!

Yep. Exhibit A is the term Obamacare. The Republicans used the word derisively. Yet what did Americans hear? Obama + Care. over and over. Obama + Care. Obama cares. Obama cares about me. Obama understands and cares about people like me. Exit polls showed that a large chunk of people who voted for Obama did it because they felt Obama cared for people like them. Amazing the strength of a word, and the Republicans happily enabled.

The only chance this country had of getting out of this mess without things getting very ugly was to cut spending, raise revenue where we could — the energy sector comes to mind, not by tax increases — and growing out of it. Romney, the successful businessman, would have been perfect for the job. The country foolishly rejected that chance on November 6. It’s going to get bad, very bad.

“Romney, the successful businessman, would have been perfect for the job.”

Romney, who to hear his son tell it, didn’t really want the job–and who prototyped Obamacare and who still thinks his version was a good idea–would have been terrible for the job. He just would have been better than Obama.

If Gingrich or Perry (or Palin) had been nominated, we might have either won or at least lost going in the right direction.

Mathematicians have invented something they call the “complex numbers”, by definition made of a “real part” and an “imaginary” part. So, the politicians are free to think they are ultimately off the hook, as they have amply demonstrated.

But they are not quite off the hook because the mathematicians have also invented the “singularity”, which contains solutions that had been overlooked until the critical moment when their discovery would be welcomed. What could that be in the political realm? Would it be something that has been carefully eliminated from the political vocabulary, on spite of the proofs of existence provided by human history? For instance, world financial tectonics, world war, etc…?

Aren’t these eventualities more comfortably relegated to the realm of the “unthinkable”?

The fundamental problem with government spending is that the incentives all drive it upwards and there is no real downward pressure that can be exerted to force it back short of total economic collapse.

But, it is fuzzy math, and there are several feedbacks which render a simple spreadsheet inapplicable. Republicans need to be careful in their prognostications of doom because the day of reckoning may not materialize in an obvious manner, and they will be painted as out-of-touch.

Let’s say, for example, that a nation is horribly in debt. What is that debt? It is a promise to divert production from domestic needs to international creditors. So, people have to work more to produce stuff which the rest of the world will buy. Voila, full employment. Assuming, that is, you can produce stuff they will buy.

I’m not saying this would happen, it is merely a possibility. But, the math is actually harder than most people think, owing to the fact that money is not a fixed quantity, but merely a medium of commerce. Of course, when production is diverted to creditors rather than being consumed domestically, the people do not get to enjoy the fruits of their labors but, this is not obvious. The obvious thing would be that everyone would be employed, even if they are markedly less well off than they would have been.

No shuffling of money leaves anyone better off than before, because the same people are still competing over the same pool of goods and services. If your neighbor has $200 and you have $100, he will outbid you on a fixed pool of goods. If you both then get an additional $100, he will still outbid you, and the value of his money will adjust nonlinearly so that you are in the same position as before. The only thing that can fundamentally leave you better off is if the pool of goods and services expands, so that you can both afford the goods and services you desire. Production is the key. Make more stuff, and everyone can enjoy consuming it. Make less, and no matter how much money there is, the poor will still be outbid in the competition for goods and services. And, expanding production requires an economy conducive to entrepreneurial activity.

Envy is one of the worst of the seven deadly sins. If we could stop worrying about what the “other guy” has and concentrate on our own situations and how to improve them, we would be immeasurably better off.

Since the governments of countries with their own currencies can freely create money, the normal rules of arithmetic don’t apply, any more than 1 + 1 = 2 holds true if you’re counting rabbits slowly. What’s really funny here, though, is for a conservative to complain about fuzzy math after thirty years of phoney budgets and plans put out by Republican politicians—the Ryan plan was particular farcical. Of course you guys just recently decided that deficits matter—previously you were too busy creating them by cutting the tax rates on the wealthy and engaging in recreational wars. Now that you see them as an excuse to further impoverish the people you despise, they are all that matters and the sky will fall if we don’t cut ‘em instantly.